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When quoting material from
this collection, the preferred citation is: Robert Ezra Park. Collection, [Box #, Folder #], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Biographical Note

Robert Ezra Park was born on February 14, 1864, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. His mother, Theodosia Warner Clark, was a school teacher. His father, Hiram Asa Park, was a soldier in the Union Army. After the war, the Parks moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, the home of Robert’s paternal grandfather, and Hiram Park opened a grocery store.

Robert Park spent the next eighteen years of his life in Red Wing. Though he did not show much promise inside the classroom, his extra-curricular interests were already wide ranging. Curious about his ancestry and the personal histories of his fellow townspeople, he studied the immigrant community of his household helper, Litza, and the careers of the middle-class citizens of Red Wing. He graduated high school in 1882, finishing tenth in a class of thirteen.

To the surprise and chagrin of his father, he ran away and enrolled in the University of Minnesota as a freshmen. Since Park passed all of his courses, however, his father’s objections to his attending college eased. He even offered to finance Robert’s education, suggesting that Robert go to the more reputable University of Michigan to further his studies. While at Michigan, Park initially chose to major in philology, eventually switching to philosophy after coming under the influence of John Dewey, who was then at the start of his career. In 1887, Park graduated with a Ph.B.

The next several years of his life Park spent as a newspaperman. He got his start in Minneapolis but proceeded to make his way across the country, working in Detroit, then Denver, and, finally, in New York. His perseverance in following a story led to being assigned to cover gambling houses, opium dens, and the like. These provided him with the exposure to the underworld that would continue to interest him in his later sociological studies.

In 1892, Park decided to quit journalism and work with his father, who had since relocated to South Carolina. On the way there, however, he learned that Dewey was planning to put together an experimental newspaper. Interested, he took a detour back to Michigan. While Park was visiting Michigan, Dewey introduced him to Franklin Ford and his revolutionary ideas about the role information should or could play in society. At the center of this revolution was to be a newspaper, The Thought News, that would unite the scholarship of the academy with the journalism of the day. Though the newspaper they planned never came into existence, Park remained in Michigan, eventually resuming his job as a journalist in Detroit.

During his involvement with Ford’s project, however, he had met a young artist named Clara Cahill. During his time in Detroit, he continued to court her and in June 1894 they were married.

In 1898, after eleven years of journalism, Park decided to return to school, and he went to Harvard to get a M.A. in philosophy. While there, he studied with the “three graces”: Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and William James. It was William James who made the strongest impression on him. Though Dewey had made him interested in the contemplative life, James turned him away from contemplating ideas to contemplating things.

Park left Harvard in the fall of 1899 to go to the Friederich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. He took several classes there with George Simmel, including the only sociology class he would ever take in his life. Park effectively dropped out, though, after discovering a book which attacked the methodological problem he had come to think was most important. The book was written by a student of Wilhem Windelband’s, and in 1900 Park went to Strassburg to study with him. He followed Windelband to Heidelberg in 1902 and in 1903 submitted his dissertation Masse und Publikum to the Heidelberg faculty.

Park then returned to Boston, having secured a position as Assistant in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. He took two other jobs to make ends meet, serving as the editor of the Sunday edition of a Boston newspaper and as the secretary of the Congo Reform Association. He grew to see that the problem in the Congo was not merely an administrative one that could be done away by changing the foreign policy of Belgium (or the West in general). The problem was inherent in the idea of colonialism and in the encounter of more and less developed peoples. The only solution, he decided, was education of the younger and less-developed people. While planning a trip to an industrial school in South Africa, Park sought out Booker T. Washington for advice. Washington invited Park to see his Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, in Tuskegee, Alabama, before he left.

After he visited Tuskegee, Park was offered a job by Washington as publicity handler for the Institute (a job that was first offered to W.E.B. DuBois). Never making it to Africa, Park instead went to work at the Tuskegee Institute. While there, his interest in the role of the Negro in the South blossomed. On top of his official duties, he did field research and took courses at the Institute. In 1910, he went on a tour of Europe with Washington to compare European poverty to its American counterpart. The book The Man Farthest Down, which Park co-wrote with Washington, came out of this visit. Park resigned from his post at the Tuskegee Institute in 1912 to spend more time with his wife and four children, who had remained in Wollaston, Massachusetts throughout his association with Washington.

In 1914, Park accepted an offer to teach a winter course on the Negro at the University of the Chicago. The offer was extended by W.I. Thomas, who had befriended Park at the “International Conference on the Negro,” which Park had helped plan for the Tuskegee Institute in 1912. Park was a perfect fit with Thomas and the department and so was quickly taken on by the University as a professiorial lecturer.

His first major work at Chicago was the famous Park-Burgess Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921). The production of the book was actually motivated more by Burgess. In 1916, Burgess was brought on as an instructor and required to teach an introductory class on sociology. He asked an older professor for his notes, but was rebuffed. Burgess then asked Park for help and they together assembled what became the Introduction. Park would later claim that his major contribution to sociology was in giving it working concepts and a systematic basis. A large part of Park’s influence was due to this book since it would later become the standard textbook for the study of sociology in America.

Park taught at the University of Chicago from 1914 until 1932. While he was there he was involved in various research projects in conjunction with his many students. During this time, his own personal interests never flagged. He studied race relations on the Pacific Coast and took trips to Hawaii, Japan, and China to further his research. In 1929, he also helped in founding the Park House, which was a social center for young people who had recently moved to the city of Chicago.

After retiring from the University of Chicago, Park took a trip around the world with his wife, Clara. When he returned from his trip, he did not cease teaching. He taught courses during this time at Michigan and at Harvard Summer School. They then settled down in Nashville, Tennessee, where Fisk University gave Park the opportunity to teach as much or as little as he wanted. Even in his old age, though, Park was interested in novel ideas and new fields of study, spending most of his years at Fisk investigating human ecology.

Robert Ezra Park died at his home in Nashville on February 7, 1944.

Scope Note

This collection consists of 13 linear feet of material and covers the period 1882-1979. It includes personal and professional correspondence, manuscripts, notes, articles, course material, speeches, interviews, life histories, notebooks, diaries, bibliographies, outlines, student papers, newspaper clippings, offprints and typescripts, and scrapbooks. The collection has been organized into five series: I. Research Material, II. Correspondence, III. Notebooks and Miscellany, IV. Life Histories, and V. Addenda.

The Robert Park papers were received in December 1969 from Winifred Raushenbush (Mrs. James Rorty), who in turn received them from Everett Hughes. Both he and Miss Raushenbush have written identifying comments on many of the papers, Mr. Hughes usually in pencil, Miss Raushenbush in blue ball point pen ink. This and the fact that some of the papers appear to be Miss Raushenbush's, Mr. Hughes', W. I. Thomas' and others means that the researcher cannot always assume that he is dealing strictly with Robert Park materials.

Most of the papers are from the 1920s, specifically the period of the Pacific Coast Survey (a survey of the Oriental population living in California and Seattle). There are, however, scattered materials from Park's period as secretary to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute, and considerable material related to courses taught at the University of Chicago on the newspaper, the Negro, the crows and the public, race relations, etc. This material may also be considered as source material for some of the books and articles Park wrote.

The Addenda contains personal material about Park's family, including autobiographical sketches; business, professional and personal correspondence from the early 1900s to the end of Park's life. It also includes diaries and journals relating to various trips; monographs, articles, holograph drafts, and outlines for various studies. A series of biographical reminiscences collected by Winifred Raushenbush for her biography of Park; Raushenbush's correspondence and notes about the biography; and several complete and incomplete drafts of the biography, Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist can be found towards the end of the Addenda series.

The correspondence within the Addenda series includes a substantial exchange with W. I. Thomas and R. D. McKenzie. Among the subject files, there is a large collection of Park's correspondence with Booker T. Washington, much of which is duplicated from the Library of Congress's Booker T. Washington collection. Park's diaries and notebooks of trips to Europe and the Far East are filled with political and social observations as well as personal asides. Significant material is found in several detailed outlines for unpublished works on population migration, race relations, and methodology.

Boxes 17-25 contain the products of Raushenbush's twenty years of work (1959-1979) on the Park biography which she wrote with the aid of Everett C. Hughes and Margaret Park Redfield. The correspondence related to the biography falls into three main categories: biographical reminiscences by Park's former students and colleagues; Raushenbush's extensive correspondence with Hughes concerning administrative details, suggested revisions, etc.; and general correspondence with publishers, Park's family, and Park's students about the progress of the book. The drafts of the manuscript are arranged chronologically to show the evolution of the biography. The fragments at the end of the drafts are parts of intermediate chapter drafts as well as revisions of material in the preserved draft chapters. The fragments are arranged in the order of the material found in the chapters of the published work. Taken as a whole, the reminiscences, correspondence, drafts, and fragments contain much information that is not present in the biography.

Related Resources

The following related resources are located in the Department of Special Collections:

"A Race Relations Survey," suggestions for a study of the Oriental population of the Pacific Coast, 1924

"The Mind of the Hobo," Chapter 10 of The City (1925) by Park and Burgess

"Behind Our Masks" and "Our Racial Frontier on the Pacific," both in Survey Graphic (May 1926)

Review of Races, Nations, and Classes for American Journal of Sociology (1926)

"Human Nature as Elemental Communication"

Review of The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia and Negro Labor in the United States 1850-1925 for American Journal of Sociology (1928)

"Mentality of Racial Hybrids," 1929

"Personality and Cultural Conflict," 1931

Box 17 Folder 10

Essays, lectures, reviews

"The University and the Community of Races," from Pacific Affairs

"William Graham Sumner's Conception of Society" from Chinese Social and Political Science Review (1933)

Division of Social Science lectures, November-December 1934: "The `In-Group' and the `Out-Group': Culture and Civilization"; "Migration and Empire"; "The Marginal Man: Personality and Culture"; and "Miscegenation and the Race Problem"

"Succession, an Ecological Concept," 1936

"Comments on Graduate Study at Fisk University," 1938

"Social Contributions of Physics," 1939

"Physics and Society," 1940

"Methods and Teaching: Impressions and a Verdict," 1941 (Xerox copies of typescript and offprint)

"Modern Society," 1942

"Founder's Day Address," Tuskegee Institute, 1942

Box 18 Folder 1

Essays, lectures, reviews

"The Social Sciences and the War" from American Journal of Sociology

"Negroes," "Negroes, Education of in the United States," "Negro Problem" for The Perpetual Loose-Leaf Encyclopedia